Emily Carr : New Perspectives

The Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to present the first nationally touring exhibition of Emily Carr's work in more than thirty years. Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon reveals the artist through the lens of her exhibition practice and career.

This landmark exhibition is divided into three principal sections that demonstrate how Carr's identity has been defined. Beginning with the 1927 exhibition West Coast Art Native and Modern, which introduced Emily Carr to the larger Canadian art establishment, the exhibition opens with a partial re-creation of this landmark show, bringing together Carr's work with First Nations art, as well as selected works by Paul Kane, Anne Savage, Edwin Holgate, A.Y. Jackson and other artists. This material is presented as closely as possible to the display techniques used in the original presentations at the National Museum and the Art Gallery of Toronto. While articulating the 1927 thesis, this section of the exhibition also provides alternate and contradictory interpretations of the artist's work from today's perspective.

The second section of the exhibition presents Carr's work within the modernist paradigm, including a discussion of Carr's relationship to modernism and primitivism and interpretation of these concepts in her paintings of First Nations sculpture and the landscape. The third section presents Carr from a post-modern viewpoint, introducing the many other voices that have been brought to bear on Carr and her work and examining Carr's self-construction through self-portraits and writings. In light of contemporary debates, this section takes an alternate look at two principal aspects of Carr's identity and of her art in terms of her relationship to the landscape, First Nations people and cultural tourism on the west coast.

Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon features some 200 objects, including paintings, sculpture, ceramics, hooked rugs, books, maps and photographs by Carr and others. The exhibition is accompanied by a book co-published by Douglas & McIntyre, with essays by Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux, Susan Crean, Shirley Bear, Ian Thom, Marcia Crosby, Gerta Moray, Peter Macnair, Jay Stewart and Andrew Hunter.

The exhibition is jointly organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada and is curated by Charles Hill, Ian Thom and Johanne Lamoureux, with the generous assistance of the Canadian Heritage Museums Assistance Program and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Travelling Exhibitions Indemnification Program.

Emily Carr
New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon